I should have a post up soon about the last week of Donald Trump’s catastrophic August Until then, I want to share this important point by Tom Socca in Slate this morning. I’m sure other smart pundits and academics have brought this up in articles, books, and lectures. However this is a great way to explain how the GOP went through a radical change in the decades preceding Trump. This change, of course, paved the way for Trump and future GOP leaders. It shouldn’t be surprising that it goes back to the to first Democrat to win the White House after a 12 year drought - Bill Clinton. We know that the GOP treated Jimmy Carter as an illegitimate president while he was in office, and for decades afterward. With Clinton, the disrespect extended to what could have (should have) been interpreted as a constitutional crisis: the Federal government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996.

At the time, the feeling was that the House, led by Newt Gingrich, was throwing a tantrum and they would come around to accept the fact that they would have to work with Clinton. But they sent strong signals that forever changed the GOP. The GOP no longer had to work with anyone. They could seriously obstruct the mechanisms of government. Don’t like a policy or the Affordable Care Act? Shut down the government. Or how about ensuring that a Democrat can never nominate a Supreme Court justice if the GOP holds the US Senate? That’s the new rule. or how about the recent scenario in Oregon where the GOP realized that it couldn’t stop a carbon tax bill from becoming law. They just disappeared (and the Democrats inexplicably took the bill off the Governor’s desk, which is another story).

Ronald Reagan floated the idea of doing away with anything founded by Democrats. That includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, AMTRAK, the EPA, and the Civil Rights Act. Today, the idea has progressed under this logic to oppose anything that was not only led or founded by Democrats, but anything that is shared, or meant for everyone on US soil. That would include National Parks and Monuments, highways, public roads, municipal water systems, and even the Statue of Liberty, the example that Socca uses this morning.

I have written here that today’s Republican party would rather burn the Republic down rather than respect a political party that represents the majority of citizens. We intellectuals are finally constructing the history of how our Republic caught fire 25 years ago. The party divide is logical, but also mad. It extends to the media we consume, the sneakers we wear, the cars we drive and the restaurant brands we choose. It’s logical. It’s mad. And it’s also unsustainable, as the Republic burns.

Let’s start with how this month began, with the aftermath of two gun massacres and this - this sick, twisted, bizarre photo. This is perhaps the most obscene thing a US president and his spouse has ever done. It was this moment that we should have realized that Donald J. Trump had lost his mind. But we needed some more insanity to draw that conclusion.

..the media and Congress should stop pretending Trump is fit to govern. He’s not. He needs to go as soon as possible, by whatever legal or electoral means possible.

But wait. There would be more. Donald Trump believes that he has done more than any president before him. On Israeli relations, he naturally thinks that he has had the most success. He also naturally thinks that any service he provides to Israel should translate into American Jewish voter support. So when he saw poll numbers showing that he will receive fewer votes from practicing Jews in 2020 than in 2016, he decided to launch a fierce, anti-semitic attack. Just as he weaponized racism against Democrats of color last month, he did it again to American Jews this month. And just in case there was any doubt or confusion as to what he meant, he repeated it, more clearly, the next day. Even the Donald Trump from 2018 might have tried to explain away his remarks via tweet, or called the video footage “fake news.” But this time, he doubled down on his bigotry and showed it off to the whole world.

When Trump launched racist attacks against Freshman Democrats of color last month, pundits tried to analyze and explain them. Even this blogger saw his racist attacks as a campaign strategy. But this month, there’s no explanation needed. Trump dropped an atomic bomb of hatred and bigotry. The Washington Post’s Dahlia Lithwick wrote:

So, Donald Trump, who just in the past two days refused to visit Denmark because it wouldn’t sell Greenland, tossed an anti-Semitic canard out to see how it landed on American Jews, retweeted a conspiracy theorist who claims Trump is the king of the Jews, reversed himself on gun policy and payroll taxes, and mulled ending birthright citizenship by way of executive order, just keeps on trucking. No check in sight.

Last year, I wrote in this blog that the Trump presidency is unsustainable. He will complete his term (or terms), but his presidency and the Republic will crash and burn before the end of his tenure. To my amazement and surprise, significant journalists are now reflecting this point of view, 30 months into his presidency. In the same piece quoted above, Dahlia Lithwick writes in terms I haven’t seen her use before. She has called Trump unfit many times, but this was -to my knowledge- the first time she acknowledged that Trump is seriously hurting us. In previous months, Trump’s tweets, erratic behavior, insults towards allies and canceled trips (how many now? two?) were analyzed as distractions from his policies and destruction of government agencies. Allies would invite him to visit less often than previous presidents, and when he would visit, they would treat him to comfort food and parades. The advice was, ignore the drama, focus on the administration’s policies, resist the administration in the courts, and wait for Trump to go away. Then, we should all encourage the next Democratic president to restore some normalcy, clean up Trump’s mess, and begin the long process of repairing the Republic.

But now, in August of 2019, there is this realization that we were sadly mistaken to wait for the next Democratic president. Trump’s presidency is destroying us. It isn’t just the policies. It’s everything he does. We need a president to be a leader and a healer. Trump only wants to pour gasoline over everything. His slander, insults, rage, temper tantrums, excessive personal time, his ignorance and his inability to think about the future are taking a serious toll on the public. The Trump presidency is destroying our national morale. It is destroying our mental health and national psyche. It is bringing a recession sooner than expected. It is making us lose sleep. It is making us drink more. And it is even, possibly, making us commit suicide more than before - especially the poor white people who voted for him. We’re in the Trump maliese. It makes the Carter malaise look like a wonderfully stable, fun and happy time. I will insist to the end that it was, dammit.

Dahlia Lithwick’s piece was prompted by an article by Matt Ford in The New Republic. It goes into detail about just how American life is much more difficult under Donald Trump. Simply put, why are we doing this to ourselves? I thought his last point was incredibly strong. Life is too short to live another day with this lunatic as our president:

He largely spends his days as president in unstructured “executive time” where he fields calls from outside advisers and ingests massive quantities of raw Fox News coverage. The work of solving the nation’s problems, except insofar as it rallies his supporters and keeps him in office, is a largely secondary concern. Soon after Trump took office, White House aides tried to persuade him that the national debt would become unsustainable in the future. “Yeah, but I won’t be here,” he reportedly replied. Trump’s time may be limited, but so is ours.

Which brings us to a third piece written within 24 hours of the previous two. James Fallows of The Atlantic explains that Trump would simply be unable to hold employment for 30 months if he were on a corporate or non-profit board, a company executive, or perhaps his best example, an airline pilot.

It took 30 months, but Trump has finally gone full lunatic. It started with twisted photos from Dayton and El Paso three weeks ago, and it continues with Greenland, full anti-semitism, and erratic economic policy. He rocked the markets again today. Just a president pouring gasoline on everything. The House should have opened impeachment proceedings in February. They were warned. They must open formal impeachment hearings immediately, even if it is only to strengthen the guardrails to keep this president -and the republic- from falling off a cliff. Trump's wear and tear on the citizenry is finally showing. We've very tired, and we’ve had enough. The House shouldn’t be in recess. it should be working on articles of Impeachment six days a week.

The Border Patrol obviously has a fascist problem. As is usually the case, this rot spreads from the top, by cynical politicians who know how to mine the treasure trove of grievance, resentment, and scapegoating which is the source of the power of this malign movement. Americans who look upon the horrible mistreatment of the immigrants from Central America as nothing which should concern them, ought to realize that there are many other groups who would be targets of attack and persecution by a fascist government. Socialists, liberals, Democrats, “bleeding heart do-gooders,” ‘Never Trump’ Republicans, intellectuals, experts-in short, anyone or any group which runs afoul the new “truth,” or shows insufficient enthusiasm for the great leader, may find themselves a despised minority, defined by the leaders of the government as enemies of the people. I hope I’m wrong, but the signs are dire. And in any event, the mess Trump has made cannot be cleaned-up by the next congress or Democratic president. Trump has energized fascists who were already in government, and has brought a lot of new fascists into government.

Trump’s supporters love it when he breaks things, is contrarian, or causes retired generals and pundits to condemn his actions. If he bombed New York, they would praise him. They will love what he did today, but it was an attack on our freedom and an insult to every US citizen. Full stop. And frankly, fuck what they think or like.

The last two weeks have been incredible. We entered the third stage of a slow-motion constitutional crisis that began with Bush v. Gore. It’s a crisis in which one political party - always the GOP - smashes a crucial part of the constitution.

In 2000, Bush v. Gore broke the Constitution so that a legal recounting of votes could be stopped. In 2016, the GOP-controlled Senate broke the Constitution so that a nominee to the Supreme Court could be blocked. We were naive to think that the block would only happen once. Because there were no negative consequences for the GOP, they will block a nominee anytime the president is a Democrat and the Senate is run by Republicans. And then in April 2019, we had a third major breakage of our Constitution. The White House simply refused to cooperate with House inquiries and oversight in any way. By simply saying no over and over, the White House stumbled upon a way to neutralize the House, which had swung Democratic at the start of this year.

When the Democrats won dozens of House races in the fall of 2018, pundits and journalists rushed to write stories about how the House would rain subpoenas upon the White House, and force Trump’s financial secrets out. Virtually no one predicted that it wouldn’t happen. The House has the power of the purse and the power of subpoena. Or it used to. Now it has zero power. Who could have imagined it?

This is a shocking discovery. Could it mean that all it takes to kill the world’s greatest constitution is for the Executive branch to refuse to play with one or more other branches? That’s all it takes? The Constitution was held together by an ‘honor system’ among powerful white men? It was an honor system all along?

Everyone, from elected officials, to pundits, to journalists to history and constitutional law professors assumed that the system couldn’t be broken because everyone was playing within the bounds set by the Constitution. Then team Trump basically smashed it. They smashed it by clinging to theories that the Executive has inherent dominant powers. Those theories have been around since Nixon, and the executive has become particularly strong since Bush 43. But it seems that the Trump White House has accidentally found the mechanism to make the executive even more powerful. And that is a simple refusal to cooperate with equal branches of government.

Make no mistake, this started with Bush v. Gore in 2000 and became entrenched by the time the GOP refused to consider Obama’s nomination of Garland in 2016. Looking at the history, Bush v. Gore had a feel of “we’ll only break the system this once, and we’ll pretend it didn’t happen.” But by 2010 the GOP had decided to break everything. Treat the Democrats as illegitimate even when they win office. Don’t respect the Power of Inquiry that is in Article 1. It’s fairly obvious that if a Democratic House were to impeach, a Republican-led Senate would not proceed with a trial.

We see where this is going. The next phase is to ignore the courts when they rule against the Executive. So in 2020 (or earlier if the Justices decide this is an emergency) the Supreme Court could affirm that House subpoenas are legal and must be respected. However, the White House will then continue to defy and ignore the subpoenas. Congress nor the Supreme Court can enforce the Court’s decision. Imagine a sporting event where the referees are ignored. I think we’re about to see that happen. The Justices are the referees, and they can’t force the White House and Congress return to regular order. The 2018 midterms and the Democratic gains in the House have been effectively nullified by Trump.

And worst of all is that we let it happen. All of us, sitting on our asses. We deserve to have our Republic burned down by these angry old men.

We should remind ourselves that we don't have to wait for Trump to commit a felony in plain sight in order to impeach him (although his recent use of the word "treason" is a technical violation of his oath). This policy, if implemented, would be very illegal and very dumb. I think Trump can be impeached for both his crimes and the policy suggestions he endorses. Just because his administration didn't go through with an idea doesn't mean they are clean.

Once again, someone in the White House has leaked a story to the press about a policy that was barely stopped. Can these people simply leave? They are not saving our nation by remaining there. Everyone who isn't evil needs to go. Everyone who stays needs to be in prison. They are all criminals.

The proposed policy idea also weakens the argument that our nation is “full.” They would love to stop all immigration, of course. But if given a choice where undocumented immigrants go, they are okay with them being “dumped” into the blue states and blue cities. Just keep them away from Rocky Mountain resort towns and elite Texas game ranches, right?

This is analogous to the abortion war. The right wing would love to criminalize abortion in all 55 states in territories. But that won’t happen. Some states, like New York, will have legal termination available for women who can travel there ad take time off from work. So their solution, in their minds, is to have ‘abortion free states.’ God won’t bring death and destruction to their red state if it can stop all family planning from being practiced.

What this amounts to, in my mind, is something far from One Nation. We are 55 states and territories, unified by a federal government that needs us to fund its forever wars. We’ve been sharply divided since Watergate. But stories like this really highlight how violent and permanent our divisions are. We will never fix anything ever again. We will never get back to the comparatively good old days of 1973, with a mild recession, no wars, and Republicans who were not only okay with abortion, but led the way in legalizing it. They celebrated Earth Day, too.

Lady Sterling has a serious question about Melania Trump. If she’s a millionaire married to a president who demonizes immigrants, why hasn’t she hired a dialogue coach to reduce her accent? Where is the effort to assimilate, dammit? I know it’s probably because she doesn’t care and never wanted to be first lady. But doesn’t she remind people of her Slovenian birth every time she speaks? Christ, even Madonna picked up a fake London accent during her years there.

Meanwhie, Trump has no agenda, no ideology, and no conscience. All he has is the reality television show that his farcical "administration" has become. From here, it will only get worse, as the country descends into farce

Tidley? As in Tidley Winks? Was that something that Daddy Fred Trump used to say?

Anyway, President Fuckface Von Clownstick might not remember, but there was a day in April 2017 when he badly wanted NASA to land humans on Mars. He badly wanted it to happen in the fall of 2020, so it would cap an incredible first term and assure a triumphant re-election.

What's the problem? You build a ship, put some astronauts in it, and send it off to the Red Planet. Oh, and make sure it arrives there on time for the Orange One's triumphant November 2020 re-election. Get on that right away Tidley!

Come to think of it, a shit ton is being re-examined. This is like the start of the third act of a film noir or thriller, where the heroine or detective hero thinks back and realizes that he overlooked some key clues that can get this saga wrapped-up. A montage of images and voices fly by. Trump is crazier than we thought. Well, of course he was.

Rudy Giuliani had been lying low for most of the fall of 2018. But by mid-December, he was back on television and speaking to the press. And in these last 33 days or so, he has been even more unhinged. He has unleashed more limited hangouts, and he even has a outrageous request from the DOJ and the Mueller team.

When Rudy was trotted out to defend Trump in early 2018, most journalists, anchors and pundits treated him as a joke or comic relief. But Marcy Wheeler wonders if Giuliani is intentionally being ineffective to assist with a future Trump conviction appeal. She was corrdect about something else as well. Mueller has taken another look at both Cohen and Manafort based on Rudy’s “haywire” news media appearances.

In one of his nutty hangouts since Thanksgiving, Rudy asserted that Trump’s crimes aren’t so bad because no one was killed. Remember the broken windows theory of crime suppression? If you nip bad behaviour in the bud, this perverse theory said, you'll stop criminal activities before they start. This quickly morphed into the assertion that if we stop and frisk young men, especially young men of color, we'll get guns off the streets, reduce the crime rate, and send a powerful message to the "bad guys", that the crack down on anti-social behaviour is real. Oh, it violated the rights of hundreds of thousands of innocent, mostly black men? It amounted to the humiliation of people whose only crime was being black in New York City? Well, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.

At last, it happened. Trump stopped winning. The day was December 20 2018. On that day, Trump committed to a meaningless government shutdown. And since that day, his presidency has been collapsing. It has been dramatic. If we weren’t already numb to Trump’s madness, this would be a shocking, unforgettable Christmastime collapse of a presidency. But nothing shocks us anymore. However, we should step back and look at what has happened since December 23. Trump is sinking fast. I said that his presidency is not sustainable. It finally broke.

It was time to pass a stop-gap bill to keep the government running another two months. However, with a new Congress beginning January 3, it was Trump’s last chance to demand his biggest campaign promise - a tall wall along the southern border, from the Pacific to the Rio Grande. Ann Colter and Rush Limbaugh demanded that he do it, just like they did 11 months before. So he did it. And he wouldn’t sign a spending bill unless he got his wall. The Senate said no, and the government has been closed since Christmas.

On his way down, he blamed Democrats for the still-unknown number of children who died in CBP custody in 2018. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad. He kidnapped children, separated them from their parents, and now, inevitably, immigrant children have died in American custody, while Trump desperately blames everyone but himself for his disgrace.

But Trump has only just begun his relentless blaming as he spirals down. For example, he made the claim that the most people being harmed by the Federal government shutdown are Democrats. Sure. And American Indians.

And then there were his own talking points over the reasons for the shutdown, which were always shifting. Why does the White House have communications office? They don’t write the talking points and tweets. Trump runs the White House his way, on his own. Only when he was left all alone this past Christmas, did he prove that he didn’t need anyone there. The press laments that he has no friends in the White House, and the “adults” are gone. That’s right. It’s just Trump now. Anyone paying attention since February 2017 knew it was leading to this.

My blog partner, Uncle Tim has been reading, studying, writing, thinking and teaching history since grammar school, which, in his case, began in 1945. Trump's comments on Russia in Afghanistan is the single stupidest thing he has ever heard a national leader say on any historical subject. It's only because he has lied so often, and been wrong so frequently on so many topics, that we simply shrug when we hear nonsense like this. You could be the most leftist, revolutionary scholar like me, and even you would agree that the president condoning the Soviet invasion by repeating Russian revisionist history talking points was completely wrong and completely mad.

While historians and national security experts picked apart the first ever approval of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by any US president, Trump went back to work 48 hours later, and he was much angrier. He had made his decision. He couldn’t reverse himself after he was provoked by the far right media to trigger a shutdown. Trump appeared ready to make this the longest Federal government shutdown ever. Or, as he called it, a strike.

It is now day 15 of the shutdown. The madnesscontinues. And the Trump presidency is finished. It has crumbled before our eyes. We know the Democrats don’t have the spine nor drive to impeach Trump (their deadline is this summer. Robert Mueller has uncovered so many crimes and cooperating witnesses, his report won’t be released until August (because that is the month that shit goes down). But Trump has decided to blow it all up now. His presidency will die on this hill. The wall never had a chance of being built at all, let alone in his first term. So he is sacrificing himself for the entertainment and rage of his racist, violent base.

I have always believed that the criminal George Steinbrenner should not have been allowed to buy a ticket to a major league baseball game, let alone own the flagship team of the American Pastime. He was a man who was convicted twice of serious crimes, who consorted with mobsters to destroy a Hall of Fame baseball player, who made illegal, corporate contributions to the Nixon reelection campaign, and who brought the worst of greedy corporate culture to baseball. His life and legacy in sports has been toxic. He really was the Donald John Trump of baseball.

So it should be no surprise that Donald Trump and George Steinbrenner were close friends.

But what might be a surprise is that Steinbrenner’s name has come up in relation to the massive Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal. He was vice chairman of he US Olympic Committee, and he led the Steinbrenner Commission in reducing the number of US Olympic committees from about 30 to 13. This had the effect of making it more difficult for athletes to have a say in the management of teams, or to launch formal complaints. Steinbrenner helped transform the USOC into a medal minting machine. However an unintended consequence was that he made it easier for a Nassar to get away with what he did for years.

Here’s a theme for this week. There are two high profile positions no one wants. They are hosing the 91st Oscars, and White House Chief of Staff. One requires two months of intensive preparation and execution. The other could last just six months and completely destroy a career. Why don’t you want these good jobs, America? These are really good, high paying jobs!

The House will almost surely swing back to the Democrats. But our criminal president Trump is still in charge, and winning at everything. And his last victory, the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, is his biggest yet. He has broken the judiciary branch, just as he has broken the executive branch. The House is currently broken, so at the moment, Trump controls all three branches of government through the end of 2018.

We have already forgotten about the GOP resistance to Trump. There is none. Instead, we have a GOP that has been completely remade in Trump’s image, while the GOP base serves as the "anti-anti Trump". His supporters don't really care about policies or issues so much, but they love driving those who despise Trump crazy. They see liberal sophisticates as their contemptuous enemies, and anything or anyone who upsets them must be good. That makes Trump their hero.

If there was any doubt that the Right Wing has any sense of shame or decency in them, that too is annihilated. Here were are, in 2018, and credible character witnesses that would have sunk an Associate Justice nomination 10 years ago are totally ignored now. Hell, 13 years ago Republicans called out an unqualified nominee from their own party. We’re in a new era now.

Don't you just love the arguments these right wingers make today? We love the life-time appointment of judges who will faithfully complete the task of handing what's left of our democracy to the corporations, and of course we applaud the destruction of the environment and the wrecking of employee's health in the name of untaxed profits. And isn't the bloated and grotesquely out of control military budget wonderful? The rich and powerful have gotten richer beyond the dreams of avarice, and the plutocrats who fund the Republican Party run the economy and the nation to suit themselves. To these anonymous right wingers, all of this is unalloyed good. Unfortunately, the president who has delivered all of these wonderful goodies is so boorish, so vulgar, so embarrassing! If only he would stop tweeting, and become more presidential. Then, life for the Republicans would be perfect!

Some sort of backlash is coming now. But I fear it won’t be powerful or angry enough. The loss of the judicial branch out to send thousands of people into the streets in protest. I fear the majority of Americans, while opposed to Trump, are demoralized and deflated. A new period of national malaise is settling in as our big problems -both economic and environmental- become much worse.

American cable TV news is sustainable for now. Enough older views keep that going. But the damage to US journalism is done. There are some amazing people who do investigative journalism for almost no pay. But there's no longer a healthy number of students majoring in journalism. Ten years from now, there there be any investigative journalists to speak truth to power, or even write about the Mets?

There's a really good line in the underrated Brian De Palma movie, Casualties of War (1989). Following a big, emotional, confession scene for Michael J. Fox, the movie quickly shifts to an army court martial. De Palma and his trusty cameraman, Stephen H. Burum, know they have to present information quickly, as the movie is wrapping-up. But they avoid television courtroom lensing and framing. There's no panning to the bench or the counsel. They keep us staring at the witness chair, as each of the accused offer their versions of the atrocities that have taken place. The prosecutor grilling them is the versatile character actor, Gregg Henry. His character is based on a real Army prosecutor, but also reminds me of trial lawyer Richard Scruggs, who also served in the military and would be about the same age as the Army prosecutor. Henry delivers one of the best lines of David Rabe's script. He shouts the sequence of events in the case to prime defendant Sargent Meserve (the incredible Sean Penn), followed by, "DOES THAT ABOUT SUM IT UP!" I think that's a strong scene. Go see the movie if you can endure the intensity. De Palma's work is consistent. Almost all of his movies are good. Even Phantom of the Paradise (1974) is now being recognized as a good movie.

2001: The Enron accounting scandal ushers a swift recession and a new era of stagnant wages. Corporations realize they were foolish to throw raises at people in the 1990s. Salaries to remain flat for decades. The ‘gig’ economy slowly begins.

2017/18: Constitutional crisis deepens as new president, assisted by at least five foreign governments, wins office despite losing popular vote. he then installs two justices to swing the court to the right for the next 20-40 years.